April 14, 2010

Does Marketing Make You Stupid?

It's amazing how quickly otherwise intelligent people become knuckleheads when exposed to marketing.

I am often invited by clients to attend confabs about sales and marketing. Over the years I have met many staff members of these client organizations. Some have been in sales, some in operations, some in finance, some in manufacturing.

As many corporations will do, sometimes these clients will move people out of one area and into another. A smart sales person who is moved to manufacturing remains smart. A smart finance person who is moved to operations remains smart. But take someone out of any other department and put her in marketing, and she immediately becomes a cliche-babbling moron.

Suddenly, someone who used to have intelligent things to say is overcome by the compulsion to spout nothing but jargon.

Instead of talking about getting further information, she now talks about "deep dives."

Instead of dates, she now has "time frames."

All of a sudden her vocabulary is limited to "low-hanging fruit" and "messaging" and "transparency" and "hand-raisers" and, of course, "conversations."

What's going on here? Does marketing make you stupid? Can't you speak like a human being anymore?

Or is marketing an occupation that is so shallow and so obsessed with trendiness that you can't feel comfortable unless you think and sound just like everyone else?

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Ad Contrarian Says:

"Shakespeare was a storyteller. You're a copywriter.""Good ads appeal to us as consumers. Great ads appeal to us as humans."

"Social Media: Tens of millions of disagreeable people looking to make trouble."

"As an ad medium, the web is a much better yellow pages and a much worse television."

"Sometimes success in the advertising business requires sitting quietly and letting clients proceed with their hysterical delusions."

"Marketers prefer precise answers that are wrong to imprecise answers that are right."

"Brand studies last for months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and generally have less impact on business than cleaning the drapes."

"The idea that the same consumer who was frantically clicking her TV remote to escape from advertising was going to merrily click her mouse to interact with it is going to go down as one of the great advertising delusions of all time."

"Nobody really knows what "creativity" is. Every year thousands of people take a pilgrimage to find out. This involves flying to Cannes, snorting cocaine, and having sex with smokers."

"Marketers habitually overestimate the attraction of new things and underestimate the power of traditional consumer behavior."

"We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand. We get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product."

"In American business, there is nothing stupider than the previous generation of management."

"If the message is right, who cares what screen people see it on? If the message is wrong, what difference does it make?"

"The only form of product information on the planet less trustworthy than advertising is the shrill ravings of web maniacs."

"There's no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he's missing a trend."

"All ad campaigns are branding campaigns. Whether you intend it to be a branding campaign is irrelevant. It will create an impression of your brand regardless of your intent."

"Nobody ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same."